NERC: Kathryn Powell: NE/S007261/1 Insects underpin almost all ecosystems on the planet. They provide innumerable services to humans and other species through regulating the environment and providing resources. Abundance and biomass declines in a dominant group of species such as insects, are thought to be particularly damaging to ecosystem health due to the disproportionately large role they play in ecosystem functioning. Local studies have found evidence that insect populations are declining. However, due to data deficiencies and biases, there is yet to be a unified consensus on the extent of insect declines across the globe, and on the contribution of drivers, such as agricultural intensification, on long-term declines. Some of these data deficiencies exist because of fundamental issues with insect sampling and analysis protocols, such as using inappropriate temporal and/or spatial resolution to analyse long-term trends, and varying sampling effort. Given the scale of the challenge to assess a hyper-diverse taxonomic group such as insects, it is important to design cost-efficient yet statistically robust monitoring methods. This project will advance the solution Researchers at Université de Sherbrooke in Québec, Canada, aim to understand the impact of agricultural intensification on insect abundance and their predators (aerial insectivores such as tree swallows). The group has collected Diptera abundance and biomass data since 2006 from suction traps across gradients of agricultural intensity, from forest to intensively farmed arable fields. Due to extensive sampling effort, with traps checked every two days over the 15-year sampling period and over a wide spatial scale, I will be able to use the dataset to provide robust analysis of long-term trends in abundance of functionally important Diptera in Québec. I will also test how sampling scale and effort affect the outcome of analyses that monitor the impact of agricultural intensification on insects, in order to inform a future sampling protocol with optimal sampling effort for capturing long-term trends. This will help fill research gaps by re-purposing a dataset to uncover insect trends in an area where they constitute an important food source for other species like tree swallows, and laying foundations for the design of better insect monitoring and analysis protocols to understand drivers of decline. My project will both add to our knowledge of insect population trends and drivers of decline across the globe, and pave the way for future insect biodiversity research. The outcomes of our research will therefore meet research needs of both UK and Canadian biodiversity policies, addressing biodiversity loss through developing efficient ways to capture long-term insect trends and the impacts of environmental drivers on these trends. It will also provide a baseline abundance trend for flies in this region, which will be required for Canada's new sustainable agriculture plans, given that the sites in the dataset cover a significant area important for agriculture in Québec. The objectives I will achieve during my placement will bring exposure to skills and experiences outside of my PhD, such as taxonomic identification and interaction with public audiences, and will make me a more skilled, communicative and collaborative researcher. My project will give me exposure to a wider network of people across Canadian institutions so that I may foster long-term partnerships with experts in my field and further develop my future career in academia.

Insects are the little things that run the world (E.O. Wilson). With increasing recognition of the importance of insects as the dominant component of almost all ecosystems, there are growing concerns that insect biodiversity has declined globally, with serious consequences for the ecosystem services on which we all depend. Major gaps in knowledge limit progress in understanding the magnitude and direction of change, and hamper the design of solutions. Information about insects trends is highly fragmented, and time-series data is restricted and unrepresentative, both between different groups of insects (e.g. lepidoptera vs beetles vs flies) and between different regions. Critically, we lack primary data from the most biodiverse parts of the world. For example, insects help sustain tropical ecosystems that play a major role in regulating the global climate system and the hydrological cycle that delivers drinking water to millions of people. To date, progress in insect monitoring has been hampered by many technical challenges. Insects are estimated to comprise around 80% of all described species, making it impossible to sample their populations in a consistent way across regions and ecosystems. Automated sensors, deep learning and computer vision offer the best practical and cost-effective solution for more standardised monitoring of insects across the globe. Inter-disciplinary research teams are needed to meet this challenge. Our project is timely to help UK researchers to develop new international partnerships and networks to underpin the development of long-term and sustainable collaborations for this exciting, yet nascent, research field that spans engineering, computing and biology. There is a pressing need for new research networks and partnerships to maximize potential to revolutionise the scope and capacity for insect monitoring worldwide. We will open up this research field through four main activities: (a) interactive, online and face-to-face engagement between academic and practitioner stakeholders, including key policy-makers, via online webinars and at focused knowledge exchange and grant-writing workshops in Canada and Europe; (b) a knowledge exchange mission between the UK and North America, to share practical experience of building and deploying sensors, develop deep learning and computer vision for insects, and to build data analysis pipelines to support research applications; (c) a proof-of-concept field trial spanning the UK, Denmark, The Netherlands, Canada, USA and Panama. Testing automated sensors against traditional approaches in a range of situation; (d) dissemination of shared learning throughout this project and wider initiatives, building a new community of practice with a shared vision for automated insect monitoring technology to meet its worldwide transformational potential. Together, these activities will make a significant contribution to the broader, long-term goal of delivering the urgent need for a practical solution to monitor insects anywhere in the world, to ultimately support a more comprehensive assessment of the patterns and consequences of insect declines, and impact of interventions. By building international partnerships and research networks we will develop sustainable collaborations to address how to quantify the complexities of insect dynamics and trends in response to multiple drivers, and evaluate the ecological and human-linked causes and consequences of the changes. Crucially, this project is a vital stepping-stone to help identify solutions for addressing the global biodiversity crisis as well as research to understand the biological impacts of climate change and to design solutions for sustainable agriculture. Effective insect monitoring underpins the evaluation of future socio-economic, land-use and climate mitigation policies.